I casually visit jobs/freelancing sites once in a while. I don't see as much demand for Lucene/Solr/ES skills for website / text / document search or other kinds of information retrieval, as I used to about 4-5 years ago.
ES seems to be the most popular but only in its ELK avatar for devops dashboards.
What technologies are you people using for text or document or website search nowadays?
Yes. They might not look trendy anymore, but they are still heavily used in the industry. I constantly see in the industry use cases where sold or ES would be much better choice, but those options are simply ignored because they are rarely visible at the top of tech publications.
From my experience, yes. Lucene is a "production" state of art library and Solr/Elasticsearch is very used in many scenarios.
This expertise is very on demand.
My company personally migrated from ElasticSearch to https://vespa.ai/ and could not be happier. Faster and way easier to maintain a cluster. The "Application Packages" feature present in Vespa opened many opportunities to improve our product( Curiously we use Lucene inside our custom application for a "Search map" functionality, for something like that https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-advance/sear... ) . I highly recommend it!
Afaik almost everything runs Lucene under the hood, it's 20 years old, no one is going to build something as good any time soon. I suppose some company like Google have their own in house solution but otherwise it'll always be something built on top of Lucene.
I guess you don't see much demand because for a lot of use cases the basic setups are good enough.
Yes, we use it as part of an ecommerce framework to index products, categories and cms content for various customers. However we dont have a specific Solr position, as we only need to make small adaptations which an average developer usually can do/interfere from existing code.
About a year ago I set up an ES cluster to load Apache logs into as an experiment. Around a month later my boss asked if it was down. "Yeah, it looks like it, since you are using it let me upgrade it from an experiment to critical!" Since then we've been using it in more and more places, and are looking to see if it would be a good fit for storing some of our user data in. The big barrier right now is that we are running the version of SQLServer right before changed data capture became part of the standard edition, and that's the way we'd probably prefer to synchronize data into ES from our primary database. We have a couple home grown solutions to synchronizing secondary data sources, and we'd like to get out of that business. The SQL server is always going to be our source of truth, probably.